Ephemeral
by lorriesherbet
Summary: Both Sasuke and Naruto have spent their whole lives followed by something that they can't quite see, that only appears as a flicker in the corner of their eyes. Where would a search for the answers of this shadow's origin lead them? [Oneshot].


**Disclaimer:** I do not own Naruto or any of these characters.

* * *

Uzumaki Naruto scuttled through the streets of Konohagakure like a wounded animal hoping to avoid the next kick. Even though the sun shined through the leaves on the many trees of the village, the little boy couldn't appreciate its beauty as his eyes were firmly glued to the ground.

He bolted through the streets, past the telephone wires overhead and the brightly coloured buildings on either side of him. The glares of the unseen sent a chill up the skinny boy's spine. And more, grocery shopping was a vastly more difficult task for a child alone.

The market was both a blessing and a curse. There were enough people that most of them wouldn't notice a six year old running by but too many for him to remain completely anonymous. Naruto had yet to think of an adequate solution to this yet.

He went to the meat stall first. The sight of dead meat swinging from metal hooks and dripping blood onto the dirt didn't faze him nearly as much as the burly, middle-aged man selling it. The boy though, despite his deep-seated fear, was no coward and decided to face the situation head on. Thus, he proceeded to sprint towards the unsuspecting vender with determined intent. If he didn't buy anything here, all he would have to eat was out-of-date ramen and a few ambiguous tins.

The vendor was visibly disgusted by the child who had so exuberantly approached him. There would be no sale here.

The wilted boy wiped his sweaty forehead, feeling like he was being boiled by the midday sun, and stumbled into a harried brown haired civilian carrying the leg of an unknown species and a brown paper bag filled with cabbage. His face scrunched up and he looked like he was about to rebuke Naruto but must have thought better of it when one of his cabbages almost tumbled out, forcing him to alter his stance to balance the vegetable before storming off into the crowd. Naruto shook his head dazedly, feeling dehydrated and despondent.

The sight of the cabbage reminded the child that he needed a balanced diet sometimes to keep him active and less likely to collapse, he made his way to the vegetable stand. He caught a familiar flash out of the corner of his eye and couldn't help but look around nervously. That never heralded anything good. No one else seemed to notice anything; however that obliviousness was not uncommon in the blond child's experience. He began to walk more quickly to his destination.

Naruto stepped towards the stand with more caution than before and began to browse the vegetables, only recognising leeks, cauliflower, broccoli and, of course, cabbage. Naruto began to pick up and bag the items that he needed, just like he had seen others do before him. However this did not continue for long before the thin, tanned blond man who ran the stand caught sight of the blond child and his eyes immediately narrowed in recognition.

"Get the fuck away from here, you monster! I won't have you hurting my business!" He shouted, snatching the flimsy paper bag from the child, who had started to back away from him in fear. The side of the bag ripped from the force of the grab and various vegetable began to tumble onto the dusty ground. People nearby turned nervously at the commotion and started to retreat when they noticed the orphan child's presence.

The little blond boy was depressingly used to such situations but that didn't make it any less frightening for Naruto. He caught another flash in his provisional vision, dark and foreboding, and snapped. The child fled, running through the crowd which parted for him like he was a leper. The sounds of the lively music in the market square quickly began to fade into nothing behind him. The streets were busy but Naruto barely noticed, too focused on seeking sanctuary from the condemning eyes that he saw all around him. He darted up the wooden steps and his hands shook as his little fingers fumbled with the keys. He fell through the door and quickly slammed it, breathing heavily as he pressed his back against the dark wood.

His apartment was quiet, soothing and exactly as he had left it. Messy, yes but still as close to home as he had ever felt. The sun shone through his kitchen window, dust particles floating in its hold. He struggled to regulate his breathing and calm down, telling himself to be strong like his jiji. He turned around and rested his forehead onto the dry wood of the door, eyes closed. He wasn't sure what made him more scared, the villagers' hatred or the shadow that he could never quite see.

"Hokages a-aren't afraid, hokages aren't afraid…" He whispered to himself, his voice quivering. The child's desperate mantra echoed in the empty room, but through the boy's eyes there was no one there to hear his words.

A while passed quietly, with the little boy's heavy breathing and the ticking of the kitchen clock the only sounds to pass the time. The shuddering of his little body began to ease. His breathing slowed. The sun still glowed through the window, dimmer than before only due to the slowly setting sun.

Taking a deep steadying breath, he pushed himself off of the door and staggered into the living room, which held a beat up, ambiguously grey couch and a rubbish covered wooden coffee table. Then just as he was about to flop down onto the sofa, there in the very corner of his eye, through his tiny living room window, he saw it. For a second, only a split second; movement. A flash of something, just a little bit closer than before.

He blinked.

He whipped his head around towards the slightly open window so fast that his neck cracked. The shadow had been just outside of the window from which he could see the apartment of his elderly neighbour, who sometimes spat on the ground at the sight of him but could still smile with all of the wisdom of her age.

Nothing.

There was nothing here with him.

His world was silent as he stared, waiting. Desperate for something to jump out at him or proof that nothing was there. The silence was so constrictive that the little boy's body groaned under the weight of it but he was too terrified to make a move to break the oppression. If he looked away then his guard would be down. In his experience, that was when the real monsters would strike at him. The silence drew out.

A magpie suddenly flew past his window, shocking him into jumping backwards and yelping. Freed from inaction, the little boy ran to the window, closing and locking it. With that done, he half staggered, half ran into his small bedroom and threw himself under the unmade covers, petrified. He dragged the duvet around himself and kept his head solidly underneath, not wanting to face the world and the monsters that lurked ever-present just out of sight.

He began to shiver, his orange jumpsuit not enough to ward off the sudden chill.

* * *

When the sun rose for the next morning the little boy's neighbour was discovered to be dead in her apartment by her middle-aged daughter. It was pronounced an accident.

* * *

Uchiha Sasuke experienced the sensation of being watched, the hairs on the back of his neck tingling with distress. It was not an unfamiliar sensation. It came occasionally. That did not make it appreciated, particularly not went he was alone in the woods, having snuck away from the compound. He had wanted to train in the practice grounds to impress his brother but was afraid that he might be side tracked by some of his more annoying cousins. Thus, the woods had seemed like the reasonable option. He had begun to regret that decision.

He rose from his seat on a log slowly, trembling slightly with nervousness as he scanned the area. It was midday and so it was still bright out, with the sun high in the sky. He still couldn't find the source. He began to walk slowly out of the clearing, jittery and uneasy. The air around him seemed colder than before, the atmosphere was tense. The trees around him seemed to be bowed by their very shadows, twisting down towards him. There was quiet.

He began to walk faster.

Pine needles cushioned his feet as he teetered on a jog, his legs pushing away from the marshy earth with force. His dark eyes darted about, desperate to pinpoint the source of his anxiety. He found nothing. The sun shone through the trees, just as it had mere minutes ago. The black haired boy could see nothing wrong, nothing out of place. He walked through a shaft of sunlight streaming past the branches of an old oak. It did not warm him.

The little Uchiha began to breathe in pants. Cold sweat clung to his back, dampening his navy shirt, its uchiwa proudly displayed at the back of his neck. His stomach clenched with a sense of nausea. Where was his house? How long had he been gone?

His vision flickered.

The raven haired child spun around, desperate to find what he had just glimpsed. The wind ruffled the dead leaves carpeting the forest floor in brown and red. All he saw were trees, stretching into the distance. The woods were quiet.

Sasuke held a shaking hand to his mouth, his eyes frantic. He whirled back into the direction of his house and broke out into a run, wild with the desire to be home. No longer caring for the caution instilled into him by his parents, he rushed almost thoughtlessly through the trees, their shadows hiding his own. Twigs snapped and pinecones were crushed under his sandals, resonating through the silence.

He saw the treeline ahead.

He forced his little legs to run faster.

Once he had broken out of the woods, he tumbled to his knees gasping. His six year old eyes, glassy from his fear, nervously glanced behind him. He saw nothing. Having almost caught his breath, he scrambled onto his shaky legs and stumbled towards his house.

The polished wooden steps of the veranda didn't make a sound as he rushed up them and into the house. His brother was sitting in the kitchen reading a book on the insect life in Iwagakure. When the raven boy staggered in, shaking from exertion and terror, Itachi rose with concern and knelt in front of the child. The little boy raised his ebony eyes to his hero and simply stated;

"Someone is watching me, niisan."

* * *

Itachi searched but the intruder was never found. Just a year later he was forced into bloodied exile, his seven year old brother left with nothing but a shadow to guard him.

* * *

A mission in wave country had been accepted by their teacher before the blond and the raven realised that their shadows were similar. They hadn't expected such an event and were confused about what it meant for them, but at least they knew they weren't crazy now. At least they knew that they weren't alone. They theorised and planned and clung to each other as lost children, desperate for the reassurance and support found from the knowledge in the other's eyes. The understanding that their companion intrinsically comprehended their own confusion and panic, their fear and loneliness, lightened the feelings of isolation felt by both shinobi. And this mutual comprehension soldered a bond between them forged from a need for comfort and an insatiable thirst for answers. They were inseparable.

When they both saw a flicker before Haku died, they knew that there was nothing they could do.

Disaster and inescapable death followed in the shadow's wake.

Once, they tried to explain it to Kakashi but he didn't understand. He laughed. He thought they were joking and if they weren't joking, then they weren't sane. The genin didn't bring it up again.

Sasuke trained to defeat his brother and Naruto grew stronger in order to protect the world from an ephemeral flicker that his eyes could barely detect. After all, how can you be Hokage when you can't even see what's attacking?

When the chuunin exams began and the shadow came more often, they were all the other had to rely on. They guarded each other as blood brothers, bound by separation and by fear. Just before the invasion, the shadow seemed to veritably ripple with gleeful malevolence. Sakura couldn't understand but that didn't matter to them; she didn't need to. They tried to protect her as best they could. However, whenever there was a glint of _something_ in the corner of their eye, the first thing each would look for was the other. Safety was the belief in the other's eyes.

Eventually it wasn't enough.

Sasuke would no longer wait for answers; he had resolved to find them. As Konoha had not proven to be forthcoming, the raven haired shinobi would simply have to chase these answers as chased his brother. If this led him from the sanctuary of comradeship, that was merely an inevitable consequence. Besides, the more he cared, the greater his anguish would be when his once precious people were stolen and shredded in shadow. Why open himself to such weakness?

But his blond shinobi companion was not so accepting of the raven child's decision. Naruto, whose own self-worth, confidence and ability to control fear, were so tangled and combined with his teammate's estimation, would not stand for the loss. Naturally, the blond followed after him.

When Sasuke defected, a part of Naruto howled. At the Valley of the End, where the black eyed boy tore a hole through the chest of his comrade and confidant, that part withered. When he spat at him and told him that there was no shadow, never had been, and that the blond orphan was just an insane, pathetic child; it began to rot.

And yet his eyes were still clouded with shadow.

Naruto's search for Sasuke became integral to his mental health and peace. Through his perspective, the only course of ensuring his psychological stability was to reconfirm that he was not alone with the shadow that both had once professed to see. The path of an alternative, of a shadow created from his own imagining, signalled too closely to madness for his comfort and when dark thoughts intruded, he merely threw himself greater into the pursuit of his wayward friend.

Time slithered past and each grew both stronger and weaker. For while their physical strength became almost concordantly incomparable and invincible, their minds were crippled with uncertainty. Neither had found the answers they sought and while separated, each lacked assurance of the credibility of their perception of reality. Neither could be sure that their vision could be trusted as they both continued to see a shadow that for others was largely undetectable.

As one searched for answers and the other searched for his dark haired companion, they began to follow the same paths and avenues. Their thoughts, crafted from the same anvil of solitude and desolation, looked to the same places to find answers about the shadow that the world constantly chased. Most only saw it once, as their eyes just began to darken with the weight of eternal sleep.

Their travels eventually brought the long battle weary ninja across each other's path. As the two young men stared at each other across a clearing surrounded and enveloped by tall oak trees, both noticed that within the eyes of the other, a whisper of the past safety that they had once experienced together still remained. But Sasuke would not allow himself to succumb to the lulling sanctuary in the blond ninja's fatigued cerulean eyes – his pride, however misplaced, was not easy to assuage.

Many battles had occurred to bring the two ninja to this grassy field under a silent, star strewn summer night. Adversaries and innocents had been slain alike and the unanswered questions of the dead seemed to follow them both. Although the glare of the red moon had already been conquered through great strife by the blond sage, white clouds shrouded the prospective path of the lunar rays, leaving the clearing in even greater darkness.

The only two surviving members of Team 7 had reached a crossroads. Aggression or regret. The last great fight of their lives, no matter the winner. Too many had died for shinobi to ever regain so many of the lost techniques that had once been held in now deceased minds. A vase, once shattered, can never return to what it had once been and in this way, the existence of ninja was now an obsolete one. The slate had been wiped clean through the unparalleled volume of destruction and society and time itself had started afresh. The consent of the remaining vestiges of the old empires was neither required nor asked for.

Only two great ninja masters endured in the world. And soon there would be only one standing amidst the ravaged remnants of a war-torn world as their battle had always been inevitable.

Sasuke stood motionless before his companion. He was attired in pure white robes only marred by a sewn uchiwa on the left side of his chest, directly over his heart. His midnight hair had grown as he did and now reached his shoulders. What little moonlight that had escaped the obstruction of the clouds illuminated the pale features of his lower face, while his eyes remained obscured by the shadows cast by his hair. His face, which in his youth had been delicate and soft with innocence and the shelter of love, had altered greatly throughout his life. After his first devastating experience of betrayal, his features had become impassive to hide the coiling fear and rabid hatred that constantly ebbed through him. That apathetic countenance had always conveyed a sense of challenge to the blond shinobi. And yet now, here on this field, Naruto noticed that although the bitterness had not left his expression, his eyes were those of a man wearied by his life.

Neither had found the answers that they had once sought together.

For Naruto, those eyes signalled what he had arrived here knowing; he had one friend left to save. Just one friend left. The whiskered sage was no longer certain that he had retained the ability to save anyone through the capricious, devouring war that had been his life. And yet defeat was a concept by which he had vowed to never allow himself to be swayed.

However the time for peaceful resolution was long forgotten.

Their battle was a silent one. Together they flowed like dancers extoling their art. Before the blond could even strike a blow, Sasuke would have begun to block that technique. Just as the black haired ninja shifted to snap out a kick, Naruto would already know what to expect and how to block. A lifetime of confrontation had made them experts in each other. Ultimately, this gave neither an advantage. For while knowledge of an opponent's style and attacks would usually be considered a benefit in any fight, an opponent possessing to ability to predict your individual movements undoubtedly would be a detriment. Subsequently, any advantage on either side was negated in their fight.

However this did make the fight more beautiful, as each moved like extensions of the other – ballet dancers in a music box spinning perfectly in time.

This may have continued indefinitely, but was abruptly altered when Naruto caught sight of Sasuke's red eyes – no longer his own. The blond hesitated for but a second. In this fight, a faltered second was fatal under the slash of a katana.

Naruto fell.

The grass cushioned his landing, warm from the summer heat and the rapid spill of his blood coating the strands. Sasuke knelt beside him, his bloody hands clutching the blond's shaking shoulders. The silence of the night was broken by Naruto's gasping breaths.

The blond gazed up into the dark eyes of his murderer. Those eyes were haunted by what they saw now. Naruto had failed in one of his first and now his final task. He could not save his oldest friend; he was far too late for that.

Both pairs of eyes caught a flicker of _something_ in their vision. And yet this final time Naruto saw more. His azure eyes widened in shock, despite the weight that seemed to be forcing them closed.

"Can you see her, Sasuke?" he whispered, reverence colouring his already unsteady tone. Naruto, mesmerised, stretched his arm out to her beseechingly. It had been so long since he had last seen her beautiful face that her presence was a balm to him, an unexpected gift at the end of his life.

Sasuke frantically searched around but did not see the woman of whom his limp comrade spoke.

And yet even made of shadows and darkness, the blond man recognised her; the missing third of their triumvirate. Her serene smile, but a twitch of her intangible lips told Naruto her purpose. She would not leave the clearing alone this night. He finally understood. The breath left Naruto's ravaged body in a sigh of acceptance. He never could deny her anything.

The black haired man began to sob so hard breathing became difficult for him. His last tie to the world would soon be severed. Nothing in his barren life was worth anything now. He looked with his stolen eyes at his fading friend, who smiled up at him and murmured:

"Don't worry, my friend, I will come back for you."

* * *

For Sasuke, who now lacked any touchstone to reality sourced from companionship due to his self-imposed ostracisation through deflection and the bonds with his comrades that he had severed, the strain of dark walls and silence began to echo. His iron grasp of certainties started to slip and unravel.

Madness unfolded. And like an unravelling thread, the more it is noticed and tampered with, the faster the seams fall apart. The more desperately the dark eyed man analysed the reason to which he clung, the more incomprehensible that reason became to him. Madness simply led to more madness.

Things that once drove him lay shattered in the tangles of his mind as the reasons and struggles that at one time motivated these agendas began to slip quietly from his waking mind, one by one. His life, an accumulation of bloodstained memories punctuated by the shock of steel on steel, began to seem less and less important to the dimming eyed man who wandered the northern mountains, passing almost intangibly from cave to cave. The skills that he had once employed as a ninja now effortlessly, unnoticeably carried him through treacherous paths and across obstacles. His bare feet, long unburdened by shoes lost from memory, no longer trailed blood on the stone and dirt. And yet while he still retained his grace, the abilities and techniques that he had revered so much in his youth had yielded to inactivity and madness, and like the strands of his reason and memory they were beyond his grasp.

Only in dreams did events from his past play out. The unfamiliar characters, drawn from the sleeping recesses of his mind were moved like mannequins to retell intricate stories swamped with glowing red eyes, the screams of crows and an insidious, pervasive trail of darkness that his small, child's hands could never catch.

Sometimes in these reveries he could almost hear the movement of scaled bodies over cold rock and the serpentine hiss of indiscernible words. He saw a dark haired corpse, as broken as the stone rooftop upon which it lay. There were visions of limp blond hair matted with dried blood and still eyes under a cloudy night's sky. Of broken wood and broken photo frames. When the darkness of slumber reknitted the discordant treads of his mind however, he had no awareness of whether his psyche had been for that night temporarily resewn as it had once been originally or whether these visions were entirely fabrications and had in fact never truly occurred at all. No sense could be made from these fleeting imaginings and the man recalled nothing of them as he rose with the dawn. Their meaning, once held so tightly and a cause of pain for so many, was forgotten and remained unmourned.

Just inside the opening of a shrouded grey stone cave high upon an indistinct mountain, the man sat clad in old, dirt covered rags, slumped with the back of his threadbare shirt to the wall. His time for action had long since passed and he no longer recalled that which he had once so desperately searched for. He only knew of but one path to travel now. The wind ruffled the dead leaves carpeting the cave floor in brown and red. All he saw was the stone before his eyes, unyielding and unchanging. The cave was quiet. The mountain was empty of any life that it had once sustained.

The man, whose weary eyes remained a dull grey, stared at nothing and waited for the flicker of an uncatchable, blue eyed shadow in the furthest corner of his eye to herald his end.

* * *

Thank you for reading and please tell me what you thought. :)


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